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FOCUS: The GOP's Wealthy Donors Have Rewarded Susan Collins for Her Kavanaugh Vote |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36361"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page</span></a>
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Monday, 04 February 2019 13:15 |
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Reich writes: "Susan Collins just had the best fundraising quarter of her career, hauling in a record $1.8 million in the final stretch of last year."
Robert Reich. (photo: unknown)
The GOP's Wealthy Donors Have Rewarded Susan Collins for Her Kavanaugh Vote
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page
04 February 19
 usan Collins just had the best fundraising quarter of her career, hauling in a record $1.8 million in the final stretch of last year. Why the big haul? Donations flooded in after Collins voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. More than $250,000 came from super PACs alone. By comparison, she raised just $140,000 total in the quarter before the vote.
It's no surprise that the GOP's wealthy donors have rewarded Collins for her vote. Throughout Kavanaugh's career on the bench he has consistently sided with corporate interests at the expense of the American people. We must stop this corporate buyout of our democracy.
Read more here.
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FOCUS: The Trump-Russia Investigation and the Mafia State |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=46742"><span class="small">Masha Gessen, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Monday, 04 February 2019 11:34 |
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Gessen writes: "It's been a strange two and a half years. From the first allegations, in July, 2016, of Russian meddling in the U.S. election campaign to the arrest of President Donald Trump's former adviser Roger Stone last week, many of us who write about Russia professionally, or who are Russian, have struggled to square what we know with the emerging narrative."
Oleg Deripaska, a Putin ally who once lent millions of dollars to Manafort, is important to an understanding of the relationship between the Trump presidency and Russia's national interests. (photo: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
The Trump-Russia Investigation and the Mafia State
By Masha Gessen, The New Yorker
04 February 19
 t’s been a strange two and a half years. From the first allegations, in July, 2016, of Russian meddling in the U.S. election campaign to the arrest of President Donald Trump’s former adviser Roger Stone last week, many of us who write about Russia professionally, or who are Russian, have struggled to square what we know with the emerging narrative. In this story, Russia waged a sophisticated and audacious operation to subvert American elections and install a President of its choice—it pulled off a coup. Tell that to your average American liberal, and you’ll get a nod of recognition. Tell it to your average Russian liberal (admittedly a much smaller category), and you’ll get uproarious laughter. Russians know that their state lacks the competence to mount a sophisticated sabotage effort, that the Kremlin was even more surprised by Trump’s election than was the candidate himself, and that Russian-American relations are at their most dysfunctional since the height of the Cold War. And yet the indictments keep coming.
Reader, I think I’ve finally figured it out. I don’t mean that I’ve figured out whether Russians influenced the outcome of the American election—I doubt even the Robert Mueller investigation will be able to answer that question. I mean that I’ve figured out how to think about what we know and not go crazy. The answer lies in the concept of the Mafia state. (And, no, I’m not invoking the Mob because Stone encouraged an associate to behave like a character from “The Godfather Part II,” as detailed in his indictment.)
As journalists who usually cover American politics have connected the dots of the story of Russian interference, those of us who normally write about Russia have cringed. Early on, it was common to point out that Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, who is now under arrest, worked for Viktor Yanukovych, who is often characterized as the “pro-Russian President of Ukraine.” In fact, there was no love lost between Putin and Yanukovych. After he was run out of town, during the 2014 Ukrainian revolution, Yanukovych did seek refuge in Russia, but during his tenure as President he was an unreliable partner for Putin at best. Perhaps more to the point, he’s a crook and a brute. He served time for robbery and assault before he became a politician, and he is wanted in Ukraine for treason, mass murder, and embezzlement. A visitor to Ukraine can take a tour of Yanukovych’s palace, famous for its marble, crystal, immense scale, and a life-size solid-gold sculpture of a loaf of bread. Manafort made a career of working for the corrupt and the crooked. That in itself tells us little about Russia or its role in the 2016 campaign.
We cringed at headlines that claimed to have established a connection between the Kremlin and Natalia Veselnitskaya, the lawyer who was at the Trump Tower meeting with Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner, and Manafort. Veselnitskaya represents a Russian company, Prevezon Holdings Ltd., which was investigated in New York for money laundering, and Veselnitskaya has been charged with lying to prosecutors about her working relationship with the Russian prosecutor general’s office. Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York claim that Veselnitskaya collaborated with a lawyer in the Russian prosecutor’s office to draft exculpatory documents for Prevezon. In media coverage, her e-mailing with a lawyer in the Russian prosecutor’s office was portrayed as evidence of a direct line to Putin, suggesting that she met with Trump’s campaign officials as his emissary. To me, it read as a lot of bluster on the part of a minor operator. From all the available evidence, and contrary to her sales pitch, Veselnitskaya did not have any dirt to offer on Hillary Clinton. To the extent that Veselnitskaya had established connections to high-level Russian officials, they were the kind that are necessary for a lawyer to be at all effective in a corrupt system.
We cringed at the characterization of the Russian online influence campaign as “sophisticated” and “vast”: Russian reporting on the matter—the best available—convincingly portrayed the troll operation as small-time and ridiculous. It was, it seems, fraudulent in every way imaginable: it perpetrated fraud on American social networks, creating fake accounts and events and spreading falsehoods, but it was also fraudulent in its relationship to whoever was funding it, because surely crudely designed pictures depicting Hillary Clinton as Satan could not deliver anyone’s money’s worth.
What we are observing is not most accurately described as the subversion of American democracy by a hostile power. Instead, it is an attempt at state capture by an international crime syndicate. What unites Yanukovych, Veselnitskaya, Manafort, Stone, WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange, the Russian troll factory, the Trump campaign staffer George Papadopoulos and his partners in crime, the “Professor” (whose academic credentials are in doubt), and the “Female Russian National” (who appears to have fraudulently presented herself as Putin’s niece) is that they are all crooks and frauds. This is not a moral assessment, or an attempt to downplay their importance. It is an attempt to stop talking in terms of states and geopolitics and begin looking at Mafias and profits.
The Hungarian sociologist Bálint Magyar, who created the concept of the “post-Communist mafia state,” has just finished editing a new collection of articles called “Stubborn Structures: Reconceptualizing Post-Communist Regimes” (to be published by C.E.U. Press early this year). In one of his own pieces in the collection, using Russia as an example, Magyar describes the Mafia state as one run by a “patron” and his “court”—put another way, the boss and his clan—who appropriate public resources and the institutions of the state for their private use and profit. When I talked to Magyar on the phone on Monday, he told me that Trump is “like a Mafia boss without a Mafia. Trump cannot transform the United States into a Mafia state, of course, but he still acts like a Mafia boss.” Putin, on the other hand, “is a Mafia boss with a real Mafia, which has turned the whole state into a criminal state.” Still, he said, “the behavior at the top is the same.”
The Mafia state is efficient in its own way. It does not take over all state institutions, but absorbs only the ones necessary for extracting profit. Some structures therefore continue to work as though they were part of a normal state. This may explain why we saw the official Russian foreign-policy establishment preparing, in the lead-up to the 2016 election, for a working relationship with the presumed Hillary Clinton Administration.
When we think about a normal state, Magyar told me, “the assumption is that the state acts in the public interest, and if that doesn’t happen, that’s a deviation.” That is true of how we think about democracies but also, to a large extent, of how we think about dictatorships as well: the dictator positions himself as the arbiter and sole representative of the national interest. A Mafia state, on the other hand, acts only in the personal profit-seeking interests of the clan. “That’s not a deviation,” Magyar said. “It’s a substantive, structural characteristic of the state. The state itself, at the top, works as a criminal organization.”
When members of the American media cover the story of Russian meddling, they implicitly portray Russia as a normal state, and the influence operation as an undertaking of the state aimed at furthering Russia’s national interests. This strikes Russians as absurd. By the measure of national interest, the Trump Presidency has been disappointing for Russia. Most of what Trump has given the Russian state has come through inaction: he has barely reacted to continued Russian aggression in Ukraine; he has failed to support NATO; and he has said that the U.S. will withdraw from Syria, although it looks like the withdrawal is unlikely to be fast or total. At the same time, diplomatic relations between Russia and the U.S. have deteriorated to the point of near-total dysfunction, and, despite considerable foot-dragging by the White House, the U.S. has continued to impose new sanctions on Russia.
By the metrics of a Mafia state, though, the Trump Presidency has yielded great results for Russia. A Mafia boss craves respect, loyalty, and perceived power. Trump’s deference to Putin and the widespread public perception of Putin’s influence over Trump have lifted Putin’s stature beyond what I suspect could have been his wildest dreams. As happens in a Mafia state, most of the benefit accrues to the patron personally. But some of the profit goes to the clan. Over the weekend, we learned that the Treasury Department has lifted sanctions on companies that belong to Oleg Deripaska, a member of Putin’s “court” who once lent millions of dollars to Manafort. If a ragtag team employed by or otherwise connected to the Russian Mafia state tried to aid a similar collection of crooks and frauds to elect Trump—as it increasingly looks like they did—then the Deripaska news helps explain their motivations. The story is not that Putin is masterminding a vast and brilliant attack on Western democracy. The story, it appears, is that the Russian Mafia state is cultivating profit-yielding relationships with the aspiring Mafia boss of the U.S. and his band of crooks, subverting democratic institutions in the process.
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Why They Kneel: Everything We Said About Police Brutality Was Wrong |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=44501"><span class="small">Michael Harriot, The Root</span></a>
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Monday, 04 February 2019 09:37 |
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Harriot writes: "As the world turns its eyes towards the NFL's biggest showcase, no one will talk about Colin Kaepernick."
'As America enjoys the Super Bowl, the Root Partnered with Fatal Encounters to examine what we don't know about police brutality in America.' (photo: The Root/FMG)
Why They Kneel: Everything We Said About Police Brutality Was Wrong
By Michael Harriot, The Root
04 February 19
 n September 11, 2018, Antonio May was arrested for trespassing in Atlanta, minutes away from where the Super Bowl will be played. After May was booked in the Fulton County jail, he began annoying officers by asking for water, according to another inmate. The Journal-Constitution reports that six deputies entered May’s cell and tasered him. Then they tasered him again. Then they pepper sprayed May. Then they hosed him down.
Then Antonio May died.
It would be easy to reduce the tragedy of Antonio May’s death to a statistic. But he is not a statistic. If one were to venture to the Washington Post’s Fatal Force, the most popular site for counting police deaths, May’s name would not even appear. That’s because the Post’s extensive database only lists on-duty, non-federal, line-of-duty police shooting deaths. May was not shot, so he is not listed.
Neither is Roxsana Hernandez Rodriguez, a trans woman who died in an immigration detention center. She was in the custody of ICE, a federal agency when a medical examiner said she was beaten to death, so she doesn’t count. The name of 41-year-old Bobby Wallace is also missing. Wallace was unarmed when he was shot by an on-duty Shreveport, La. police officer but — as extensive and useful as the Washington Post database may be — they sometimes miss a name.
Earlier this year, The Root reported that police officers killed 1,165 people last year. That number came from a review of the Washington Post’s police shooting data and the Mapping Police Violence.
That number was wrong.
The Washington Post’s Fatal Force says police shot and killed 998 people in 2018.
That number is wrong.
In 2014, for the first time in history, the Obama administration tasked the FBI with counting how many arrest-related deaths happened that year. When the Bureau of Justice Statistics issued its report, it found that the FBI had been under-reporting the number by an average of 545 deaths per year.
That number was wrong, too.
The Washington Post’s shooting data is the most frequently cited source because they are one of the few media sources with the resources and dedication to continue the ongoing research. The Guardian tried it for two years. Bowling Green’s Phillip Stinson had an expansive police crime database that eventually ended. There was a database called Killed By Police but it disappeared. After comparing all of the publicly available data, we determined... well... No one knows how many people police kill each year.
The reason the number remains a mystery is that law enforcement agencies, politicians, lobbyists and the good ol’ NRA have gone to extraordinary measures to prevent government agencies from counting how many people die at the hands of law enforcement agencies.
So we decided we’d count them ourselves.
***
The Root partnered with D. Brian Burghart, the founder of Fatal Encounters—the site whose goal is to create an “impartial, comprehensive, and searchable national database of people killed during interactions with law enforcement” —to see how many people police killed last year.
Like the Washington Post, Fatal Encounter’s data comes primarily from media reports. But unlike the Post, Fatal Encounters also counts citizens who were stabbed, tasered, beaten or otherwise died during a police encounter.
Burghart, Fatal Encounters, and The Root meticulously combed through the data from the WaPo’s Fatal Force (available here). We found 12 mistakes (6 duplicate entries, 6 errors) in the Post’s data, bringing their total to 986 deaths for 2018.
We also sifted through Fatal Encounters numbers (available here) and determined that they missed 2 gunshot-related deaths that the Washington Post caught. But we also discovered 109 people who were shot and killed by police officers that fit the Post’s criteria who were not listed on the Post’s site.
When we added in the 436 other people who died by means other than gunshot, the number ballooned. The Post doesn’t list the 146 deaths that happened in federal custody or people killed by federal agents, so we counted them. Fatal Encounters also counts suicides during arrests or in police custody as a fatal encounter, but, for our purposes, we left those names out of our dataset.
“If I’m only counting the gun deaths that fit their limited criteria, this means they’re only catching about 90 percent of police-related gunshot deaths,” Burghart explained.
When you add these numbers, there were 1,575 non-suicide police-related deaths in 2018.
...We think.
***
On December 21, 2018, Donald Trump signed a sweeping new criminal justice reform bill into law. The First Step Act reduced draconian drug sentences, pivoted federal prisons toward rehabilitation and sought to decrease mass incarceration. One of the people who praised the passage of First Step was the Senate’s only black Republican, Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC).
“Today the Senate took a great step forward in building safer communities and a brighter future for those who have served their time and are re-entering society,” Scott said. “By cutting recidivism, encouraging job training, education and mental health and substance abuse treatments for incarcerated individuals, and making our criminal justice system both smarter and tougher, we have taken a positive step forward tonight.”
But Tim Scott was disappointed.
Since 2015, Scott had been trying to pass a piece of legislation. Named after one of his constituents who was famously shot by police officer Michael Slager, the Walter Scott Notification Act would simply require every law enforcement agency in America to report all police shootings and deaths to the federal government. According to the bill, any state which refused to report would face a 10 percent reduction in federal law enforcement grants and funds. Information included by each state would include:
- The victim’s name, race, age, and sex
- The officer’s name, race, age, and sex;
- Whether the victim was armed or not
- A description of the weapon used by law enforcement
- A detailed description of the event
- The finding from law enforcement as to whether the shooting was justified or not
Scott tried to pass the proposal as a standalone bill, to no avail. When he attempted to attach it to funding legislation, it failed. So, in a last-ditch attempt, as the First Step Act worked its way through the Senate, Scott attempted to slide his much-needed idea in as an amendment to the groundbreaking criminal reform bill. But police unions whispered in the ears of his fellow legislators and once again, the Walter Scott Notification Act fell by the wayside.
As the world turns its eyes towards the NFL’s biggest showcase, no one will talk about Colin Kaepernick.
But whether or not his name goes unmentioned, when Gladys Knight sings the Star Spangled Banner, tens of millions of people will remember his protest. When Maroon 5, Travis Scott and Big Boi take the field for the halftime show, the grandiose display of mediocrity will serve as a reminder of Kaepernick’s impact.
The NFL whiteballed Colin Kaepernick for the same reason the government doesn’t count law enforcement-related killings. Whether it is a pile of dead black bodies, racism or one lone quarterback using his platform to take a stand, America believes that you can actually solve a problem by pretending it doesn’t exist.
This is why people who talk about racism are called “race-baiters.” This is why people who talk about the injustice of police brutality are called “anti-cop.” This is why truth-tellers are always ostracized and vilified.
This is why they kneel.
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The Old Indoorsman Looks Out at Winter |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=48687"><span class="small">Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Blog</span></a>
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Sunday, 03 February 2019 14:59 |
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Keillor writes: "Severe cold weather gets a person's attention and encourages intelligent adaptation to real-life conditions by threatening genuine misery if, for example, you venture outdoors in your bloomers to tinkle in the shrubbery."
Garrison Keillor. (photo: WPPB)
The Old Indoorsman Looks Out at Winter
By Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Blog
03 February 19
 itter cold in Minneapolis last week with a high of nine below one day, which is colder than a witch’s body part, but we do have central heating in our building and I am no longer employed as a parking lot attendant as I was when I was 19, responsible for herding drivers into double straight lines as a bitter wind blew across the frozen tundra, and so, as we in Minnesota often say, “It could be worse.” Especially if you were married to a witch.
A beautiful snowfall moved in Sunday around twilight and my love and I took the long way home from the store where we’d stocked up on provisions and drove around the lakes to admire the whiteness descending through the streetlights’ glow than which there is nothing in nature more beautiful. It belonged in a movie, a love story about a man and a woman caught in scandal, besieged by the opposition of their families, who come to a friend’s house for shelter from the storm and realize that the storm is beautiful. The trouble they’re in is utterly lovely because they have each other and the snow gives them an excuse to hide out.
In Minnesota, we dream of someday being snowbound, unlikely as it is with our enormous investment in snow-moving equipment. Even in the counties along the Canadian border, it’d be hard to get snowbound for more than a few hours. Nonetheless, something in us wants to be stranded, separated from civilization, roads impassable, power lines down, no computer, the cellphone battery slowly running down, until we find ourselves back in the 19th century or even a Middle Ages crisis with just a wood fire, some beer and cheese, and us ignorant peasants hunkered around it, telling dirty stories like in Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales.”
Severe cold weather gets a person’s attention and encourages intelligent adaptation to real-life conditions by threatening genuine misery if, for example, you venture outdoors in your bloomers to tinkle in the shrubbery. This is part of the problem with our government today: it would work better if the national capital were Buffalo. Washington was chosen for its proximity to Mount Vernon: the Father of Our Country was looking for an easy commute. The temperate climate of D.C. encourages dreaminess and dramatic posturing and blather. If elected officials had to walk out of their warm homes, get into a freezing-cold car, start it, and drive on icy roads to the Capitol, it would give them a better sense of the real world.
I know about this because I was young and headstrong once and we boys considered it definitely not cool to dress warmly. Cool guys ignored winter and traipsed around hatless, gloveless, scarfless, jacket unbuttoned, hopping around snowdrifts in their sneakers, making no concessions to winter whatsoever. You smoked cigarettes, you drove fast, you didn’t dress warm, you were cool.
Being cool is ultimately a bore. I used to be cool and I know. It is much more interesting to dress warmly and be able to wander around and look at the world and not think about your discomfort. I have a pair of insulated boots made in Canada so the instruction booklet is bilingual and I see that the boots (made of rubber, or “caoutchouc”) are of “première qualité” and “très robuste” in “temps très froid” even in “L’Arctique.” It puts a whole new shine on winter to think of it in French: it makes bitter cold, or “froid mordant,” less mordant, according to Sigmund Froid.
Wearing big boots, I feel clubfooted at first as Frankenstein’s monster must have felt when he broke out of the laboratory, but at least I’m warm. I am trudging along in my peasant boots, enjoying the 19th century. I walk into the park and look at the snow descending quietly and the trees laced with white and think of Robert Frost’s famous poem about stopping by woods on a snowy evening. He wrote: “I know the guy who owns these woods. He lives in the village. I just like looking at it. My horse thinks I’m nuts, stopping on a dark night with nobody around. It’s rather quiet. The woods are lovely, dark, and pretty thick. But I said I wouldn’t be gone long and so I better get a move on.” Something like that. Winter is inspiring. Hundreds of poems have been written about standing on the beach and looking at the waves and I can’t remember a single one of them.
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